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Yesterday, we were off to the Queen Elizabeth Hall at the Southbank Centre to seeMeow Meow's Little Match Girl, a cabaret show inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's tale. I personally loathe musicals (apart from the original movie of My Fair Lady) but I love cabaret (Meow Meow's own strand has been dubbed kamikaze and post-modern cabaret) and hope to be seeing more next year.

Meow Meow is incredibly glamorous and charismatic, with a natural grace and edge without equal. The show is clever, poetic, bawdy, seductive, naughty, poignant, hilarious, teasing and ambitious. It is also much richer and complex than first appears: social and gender issues are buried just under the surface, poking their stubborn heads here and there under a shower of glitter. The show is full of references too:

Flaming in my head I've had Austrian artist Irene Andessner's works on the Edison light-bulb-covered dancer Milli Stubel, Loie Fuller's experiments with light and shadow, John Donne's A Nocturnal upon St Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day, the women of Bratislava that Andersen encountered screaming through the burnt city looking for their lost children, Joan of Arc and the Catherine Wheel, Annie Besant, the Bryant and May match girls who went on strike in 1888, Moira Shearer and The Red Shoes, Jean Renoir's tin soldier, witches at the stake, global warming, "ice" addiction, exploring planets, fragile and naughty pyromaniac children. ...

Picture from Southbank website

Meow Meow - real name Melissa Madden Gray, is an incredible individual. Read more about her background and experience in this excellent article HERE.

Southbank is spoiling us in 2013 with an amazing festival, The Rest is Noise, "The Soundtrack of the 20th Century" (SATURDAY 19 JANUARY 2013 - SUNDAY 9 JUNE 2013) The programme is packed-full with events - some of them free and a lot rather affordable. We hope to go to some of them!